Obituary from The Times, 24 March 1925.

The death of Marie Brema at Manchester on Sunday removes one who played a great part in music throughout a strenuous life.  An Englishwoman by birth (she was born in Liverpool in 1856), she came of German and Virginian parentage.  In addition to the possession of a fine mezzo-soprano voice, she was endowed with a strongly dramatic temperament which impressed itself on all her work.

The name of ‘Brema’ was adopted by her, partly in reference to her father’s birthplace Bremen, when she decided, after her marriage to Mr. Arthur Braun, to pursue a musical career.  She studied singing under Sir George Henschel and made her début at a Popular Concert in 1891, and it was not until she had made one or two tentative appearances in opera in England that she determined definitely on an operatic career.  Her success was rapid for in 1891 she was singing at the Shaftesbury Theatre, London, the minor part of Lola in Cavalleria Rusticana, and in 1894 she appeared at the Bayreuth festival as Ortrud in Lohengrin and Kundry in Parsifal.  That she was able to sing Brunnhilde in Die Walküre during a tour which she made in America in the same year as her first Bayreuth appearance is evidence of the wide range both of her voice and of her dramatic capabilities.  This tour was made with the Damrosch Operatic Company, and henceforward Marie Brema’s reputation stood high in two continents.  Later she sang repeatedly at the Paris opera and in Brussels, when her Orphée (Gluck), Dalila (Saint-Saëns), and Amneris (Verdi) made a very powerful impression.

In England circumstances made her fame rest primarily on her performances in the concert-room, and more especially on those of the big provincial festivals.  She took part in the productions of several important new works, notably in Parry’s King Saul at Birmingham, 1894, and she was the first to sing the part of the Angel in Elgar’s Dream of Gerontius, also at Birmingham, in 1900.  Among her operatic performances in London it must be recalled that she created the part of Beatrice in Stanford’s Much Ado About Nothing at Covent Garden in 1901.  A memorable event, not only for her individual performance, but for the art of the whole production which was under her control, was the presentation of Gluck’s Orpheus at the Savoy Theatre in 1910.

She was a great teacher, and in recent years she devoted herself to the direction of an operatic class at the Royal (Manchester) College of Music.  The performance by her pupils there in 1914 of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas showed how thoroughly she had succeeded in inspiring them with her own ideals of dramatic expression in music.

On the 28th of July 1898, Queen Victoria wrote in her journal :

Mme Brema is a wonderfully fine singer with a very powerful, most sympathetic voice. She has been singing in Wagner’s Operas at Covent Garden, & sang that beautiful song from Saint-Saëns, “Samson & Delilah” quite admirably. Perhaps the most touching of all her songs was a lovely little one by Maud Valérie White, called “Farewell,” which we asked her to repeat. She is English, has a tall fine looking presence, & is I believe a most admirable actress….

[RA VIC/MAIN/QVJ (W) 28 July 1898 (Princess Beatrice’s copies)]